Dear Apple: if you don’t care as much about Mac hardware……

Stop worrying about how thin and light it is. I would like to return to the days where I could actually upgrade the RAM in a laptop, even change out the drive (hard drive, SSD, whatever storage medium was in there). Now there’s such a race to make these things “Internet appliances” and not actual computers, that there’s nothing that can be done to it after purchase. If I thought I didn’t need anything more than 256GB, but decide later I was wrong, I’m now screwed. Just buy an external drive, right?

Well, yes and no. For one thing, it’s one more thing to carry. For another, it takes up yet another port on machines with increasingly scarce “port real estate”. On a MacBook, you have power, external drives, and any other peripheral vying for the same single port. On the base MacBook Pro, there are just two USB-C ports. In fact, you have to spend nearly $2K to get a machine that’s got four ports.

I’d love to see a slightly larger chassis, with more ports and interchangeable RAM/drives. You know, like it was in 2012, before things had to get even thinner and lighter. As it is now, we get really expensive machines that can’t be upgraded, and who’s specs are far behind everyone else. Want a 3 pound quad core machine with 24GB of RAM? You can have it! But you’d better plan on buying it from Lenovo.